During such interventions, a surgeon observes the field of operation using a microscope and performs manipulations using a surgical tool. In comparison to surgical interventions performed whilst observing with the naked eye, microsurgical interventions during which the surgeon perceives the tissue to be manipulated and the tool used therefore as a microscopic image are difficult to perform. It is desirable to equip the microscope so that work is simplified for the surgeon and, for example, so that data is displayed in the microscopic image or measurements are performed automatically. Possible measures for assisting depend on the progress of the intervention as different assistive measures are desirable or possible in different stages of the intervention. In particular, different surgical tools are used in different stages of the intervention. Therefore, desire raised to automatically recognize tools handled by the surgeon and contained in the object field of the microscope and to perform specific measures in dependence of the recognized tool.
Such automated recognition of tools in microscopic images requires automated image processing performing object recognition. During the object recognition, structures contained in the image are compared to a series of prospects and a corresponding prospect is recognized when a sufficient correlation is achieved.
It has been shown that a sufficiently faultless identification of tools in question in microscopic images is not possible at a sufficient certainty and in real-time using conventional methods of object recognition.